Proving that what you do has real impact.

In my BI journey these last several years, I had to face a common need: provide a way for business analysts to maintain (add, modify, delete) records on a backend table. It’s very common that users need to classify/aggregate the data from your transactional systems with taxonomies not in those source systems, and thus the… Read more

Scenario The majority of BI-related activities require measuring something on your business process. These measures usually relate to one of: Inputs to a business process (usually leading indicators, i.e. number of incidents occurring; volume of calls happening; duration of calls; number of transactions). How the process performs (i.e. number of tickets per analyst; time to… Read more

Scenario In my previous post “Ranges as Filters for Dates” I covered a way to group on ranges of months that we could use in selections. In this post I’ll share a way to simplify the measures using DAX’s SWITCH function, and also apply it to other cases. HowTo In the previous post we used… Read more

Scenario We may have data across months, and we’d like to, at times, focus on the next 3 months, the following quarter, or the first 6 months… or similar, i.e. how many people between 20-30 years old, or 30-40, etc. How do we define these ranges, and how can we visualize them? HowTo Let’s say… Read more

Scenario If we increase the current forecast by 5%, what would have happened with the variance to forecast? If we had reduced by 3% instead, then what? How can we provide an input parameter to calculate variables and see the impact of that change in the charts and trends? Let’s start from a simple report… Read more

Scenario Let’s assume we have data about projects, and we want to rank the projects by budget, so that if we filter the data by some criteria (i.e. region, country, or some other classification) the ranking recalculates for the new scope. We also want some metrics calculated for the TopN projects, i.e. total budget for… Read more

The traditional definition of “data warehouse, or DW” from late ‘70s/early ‘80s involved the end-to-end solution for business users… from extracting data and aggregating it into special data models, the queries, all thru the applications/reports the users interacted with to consume that data. In the ‘90s, the concept of “Business Intelligence, or BI” came to… Read more

Making decisions that drive action without objective data to back it up makes no business sense at all, but it happens all the time. Much guess-work goes on, so huge risks and costs follow. And employees get frustrated with activity that doesn’t deliver the expected value. Some examples of not really managing your business: Not… Read more